What Nancy did not learn until later was that Deaver was also struggling with alcoholism. She grew worried when she tried to reach him for several days on the telephone and got no response. His wife, Carolyn, was evasive, and finally told her: “Nancy, I can’t say where he is; he made me promise not to. But I’m going to be seeing him later, and I’ll ask him if I can tell you.” Knowing the stress he was under, Nancy’s first assumption was that Deaver had suffered a nervous breakdown. That night, he called Nancy and told her he was in an addiction treatment facility in Maryland. “Thank God!” she exclaimed. Deaver was surprised at her reaction, but Nancy explained that alcoholism is “a disease, and one you can handle. I was worried sick you might have cancer. This one you can cure.”
As Deaver tried to pull himself together, his legal difficulties mounted. In March 1987 he was indicted by a federal grand jury on five counts of perjury. The White House issued a terse three-sentence statement, in which the president said he and the first lady “keep him and his family in our thoughts during these difficult times. We wish him well.” Nancy cut off contact with Deaver, except for occasional messages sent through a mutual friend, former CIA director Richard Helms, who she knew still lunched with Deaver regularly. She would later say she maintained her distance on the advice of the White House counsel. Deaver was shocked to realize that he was expendable even to her. “He had been with them for so very long, but he felt very abandoned when he got in trouble,” Jim Baker told me. “It was really sad, because he was really tight with her. But after he got in trouble, it reflected badly on the president.”
With Deaver’s trial approaching in the fall of 1987, his lawyers offered his alcoholism as a defense, saying he had given false statements because his judgment was impaired. They revealed he had been hospitalized three times in 1985 and 1986 for problems related to his drinking. Safire wrote another blistering column, pointing to Deaver’s once-tight relationship with Nancy and asking: “Was the First Lady so involved with her crusade against drug addiction that she failed to notice that her closest confidant was a drunk?”
Then came what Nancy regarded as Deaver’s biggest betrayal. In early December, while his trial for corruption was under way, the Washington Times got an advance copy of a memoir that he had written with coauthor Mickey Herskowitz. Deaver’s $500,000 advance was helping to pay his legal bills. The real news in Behind the Scenes was its revealing portrayal of Nancy as both a powerful player within her husband’s White House and a moderating force against his more conservative views and those of his top advisers. Deaver named the figures that she and he had gotten rid of or shunted aside over the years. He also described her fondness for liberal thought leaders and celebrities considered the enemies of the Right.
“She was the little girl with her nose pressed up against the candy-store window,” he wrote. “Nancy Reagan is not uncomfortable among free spirits and intellectuals.” No doubt Nancy was just as offended—maybe more—by how her husband came off in Deaver’s book. Ronnie was portrayed as a man of strong principles but little introspection or intellectual depth. “It would be fair to say that Nancy has the stronger curiosity of the two of them. She is more aware of the finer things and of the subtleties of human nature. She enjoys reaching out to new people of whatever political coloring,” Deaver wrote.
When Deaver was convicted on December 16 on three of the five perjury counts, the White House issued a perfunctory statement from the president saying he and Nancy were “sorry to learn the jury’s decision in Mike Deaver’s trial. He has been a longtime friend and has served with dedication. Beyond that I cannot comment further at this time, since the decision will likely be appealed through our court system.” Nancy called Deaver after the verdict, but that was the last he heard from her for a long time. She wrote in her 1989 memoir that “our friendship hasn’t been the same since.” Their silent period lasted four years.
Deaver, who was facing up to fifteen years in prison, got off relatively lightly. In September 1988 he was given a suspended three-year sentence, placed on probation, fined $100,000, and ordered to perform 1,500 hours of community service. He was also barred from lobbying the government for three years. Ronnie, by then campaigning in Florida for Bush, told reporters that he had never believed Deaver had done anything wrong. In the last days of his presidency, Deaver’s daughter, Amanda, called Duberstein and asked whether Ronnie might consider a pardon for her father. No doubt the Reagans discussed this at length. “Yet Mike has passed the word that he wouldn’t accept a pardon,” the president wrote in his diary on January 16, 1989, four days before George H. W. Bush was to be inaugurated. So it didn’t happen.
Deaver, by then in his fifties, was flat broke and had lost his means of earning a lucrative living. Stu Spencer loaned him $50,000 to pay his taxes. During the next few years, the man once seen as the wizard behind Ronnie’s image wallowed in bitterness, mixed with what remained of his pride. “I kept casting around in my own mind for people to blame my situation on, and as I did that, I kept coming back to my old friends, Ronald and Nancy Reagan,” he wrote later. “How could they seem to be getting along so well without me? Why was it that I heard from them only secondhand these days? How hard would it be for Ronald Reagan to pick up the phone and call me? Hadn’t I given him the best years of my life? I wanted desperately to move on, to put the past behind me, but my self-pity and growing bitterness just wouldn’t let me.”
Deaver was far from the only one for whom service on behalf of the Reagans had left a sour aftertaste. In the final years of Ronnie’s presidency and the first few years after he left office, there came an unusually large number of unflattering books about them written by former administration officials, even by their own children. One by departed press spokesman Larry Speakes, published in March 1988, described the first lady as a “prima donna” who was “likely to stab you in the back.”
None, however, would create such a sensation as the one authored by scorned White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan. Shortly after Regan left, William Henkel, who ran the White House advance operation, went to visit him in his new Washington office. They began talking about what Regan might do next.
“Later today, I’m meeting with my literary agent, and we’re working on selecting a publisher. I’m writing a book,” Regan told him.
“Well, are you going to wait till after he gets out of the presidency?” Henkel asked.
“Hell no,” Regan said.
Regan’s For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington came out in May 1988. Its revelation of Nancy’s reliance on a San Francisco astrologer overshadowed everything else in the news for weeks. She had known that the former chief of staff was writing a book and hadn’t anticipated he would treat her gently. But this was something she hadn’t expected: “It never, ever occurred to me that Don Regan would do what he did—take this information about my interest in astrology and twist it to seek his revenge on Ronnie and me.”
The first lady remained silent, offering no explanation or rationale for the events that Regan laid out in his book. That would wait for her own memoir, for which Random House paid a reported $2 million. She had signed the deal in July 1986. My Turn was scheduled to be published in 1989, after Ronnie was out of office. Her coauthor was the accomplished William Novak, who had written a blockbuster autobiography in 1986 with Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca. They began working together while Nancy was still in the White House. Novak traveled in liberal circles and knew of her only by reputation, so he was unprepared for the soft-spoken and sensitive woman he met. He was even more surprised to discover he liked her. But this turned out to be the most difficult and frustrating project he ever undertook.
“It was a very hard book to write, because Nancy was not a talker. She would rather listen,” he said. Most of their early time together was unproductive. Nancy’s diary was filled with boring entries, and she would shut down when Novak pressed her for more interesting material. “I’d rather not talk about astrology,” she insisted. Nor
did she find much joy in the whole endeavor, which would frequently bring her to tears. “I always had the sense that the reason she did the book was a fear about not having enough money; that in their circle, the Reagans considered themselves poor,” Novak said.
Her concern about finances was another indication of how Nancy’s deep-seated anxiety persisted. She and Ronnie had achieved success on a scale that few people in history would ever know. But she never lost her fear that there was a trap door around every turn; that everything they had could disappear in a heartbeat. As her friend and aide Robert Higdon put it, Nancy always had her eye out for the next place she might have to make a hard landing. The imperative to accumulate wealth—as quickly as they could—was one way to cushion against a fall. And while both Reagans were looking forward to returning to Los Angeles, there were practical things to consider. For one, they didn’t have enough money to purchase an upper-bracket home in the overpriced real estate market. Ronnie’s high-earning days on General Electric Theater and the lecture circuit were long behind him. Their tax returns for 1987 showed they were living mostly on his presidential salary of $201,526 a year. (Also noted in press reports: Nancy, who was still claiming to have been born in 1923, did not take a deduction available to those over sixty-five.)
So, Ronnie and Nancy made a housing arrangement reminiscent of what they had done in Sacramento, after Nancy found the shabby governor’s mansion unsuitable. Nearly twenty of their wealthy friends, including their longtime benefactors Holmes Tuttle and Earle Jorgensen, paid $2.5 million for an estate in LA’s exclusive Bel Air section. They leased the 7,200-square-foot home to the Reagans at market rates, under a deal that allowed the couple an option to buy. Soon after Ronnie left office, it was deeded over to a trust in their name. The address on St. Cloud Road was changed from 666 to 668 on city records, out of Nancy’s concern that the original number might be construed as a biblical reference to Satan.
All of this passed muster with the government ethics watchdogs. But Nancy’s love of freebies would bring one more spectacular embarrassment to the White House during her husband’s final months in office. In mid-October 1988 Time magazine reported that, despite Nancy’s public promise six years earlier that she would quit “borrowing” costly designer outfits, she had indeed continued the practice. The article cited gowns worth upward of $20,000 each, furs that included a $35,000 Russian sable, jewelry valued in the six figures. One designer alone, David Hayes of Los Angeles, said he had loaned her as many as eighty made-to-order outfits, only half of which had been returned, and which were worthless anyway once they had been worn. “She set her own little rule, and she broke her own little rule,” Nancy’s spokeswoman Elaine Crispen said. “I’m admitting for her that she basically broke her own promise.”
Except it was more than Nancy’s word that was at issue. The Reagans were also running afoul of the tax law. After Ronnie was out of office, the Internal Revenue Service would present them with a hefty bill for back taxes and interest on what its audit concluded were $3 million in unreported gifts of clothing and jewelry between 1983 and 1988.
The simmering tension between Nancy and the Bushes continued right up until the end of Ronnie’s presidency. George Bush nailed down his party’s presidential 1988 nomination fairly easily. But it was notable that he did not actually receive the president’s endorsement until the primary race was over, after his challengers had either dropped out or suspended their campaigns. Entries in Ronnie’s diary indicated that, privately, he was rooting for Bush. But his long-standing policy was not to intercede in battles within his own party. Nancy, meanwhile, was unenthusiastic about either of the Reagans getting deeply involved in the 1988 presidential race. She nixed the Bush campaign’s plan to roll out Ronnie’s endorsement at a big rally on the night of the May 3 Ohio primary, when the vice president clinched enough convention delegates to claim the nomination. Nancy said that having Ronnie play second banana at Bush’s victory celebration would be unpresidential.
The long-awaited embrace finally came a week later at a black-tie Republican fund-raiser known as the President’s Dinner. This gathering of GOP fat cats was not the setting that Bush’s team would have picked for their man’s big moment. Ronnie’s actual announcement of his endorsement came off as tepid, almost offhand. At the end of a twenty-minute address extolling his own record, Ronnie called Bush “my candidate” and said, “I’m going to work as hard as I can to make Vice President George Bush the next president of the United States.” Bush’s team had expected something more effusive, given the vice president’s steadfast service. In fact, Ronnie had written a rousing one in his own hand and shown it to Bush. “We later learned that Nancy took it out, as ‘this was Ron’s night,’ ” Barbara Bush fumed in her diary.
That summer, with his campaign struggling, Bush asked his old and close friend James Baker to leave his post as Treasury secretary and come run the operation, as he had in 1980. Baker was surprised when the president said he shouldn’t go.
“The vice president needs me,” Baker pleaded.
“No, Jim,” Ronnie replied. “You’d be much more valuable to him if you just stay here and run the economy of the country.”
Baker figured out quickly what was really happening. The problem was Nancy. “I saw the fine hand of the first lady in that,” he recalled. So Baker returned to Bush and told him he could not be the middle man in this particular transaction: “I hate to tell you, pal, but this ain’t going to work unless you talk to the president yourself.”
Nancy was there when Bush and Baker made their pitch to Ronnie, and she made it clear she wasn’t happy that the Treasury secretary wanted to step away from the job he had. But Ronnie finally relented: “Well, George, if that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do.” Then, typically unperturbed at the comings and goings of people around him, Ronnie asked Baker to come up with some suggestions for a successor at Treasury.
Bush’s campaign strategy was to offer himself, essentially, as a third Reagan term. But Nancy resented the ways in which her husband’s vice president tried to reclaim his own identity by rejecting some of the harsher aspects of the previous eight years. At the Republican convention in New Orleans that year, Bush promised “a kinder, gentler nation.” Nancy was widely reported to have muttered, “Kinder and gentler than whom?”
The fall campaign saw a fresh round of stories about Nancy and Barbara feuding. In October Time noted Nancy’s absence from a “star-studded” rally for Bush and his running mate, Indiana senator Dan Quayle. According to the magazine, Nancy sat upstairs in her suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles while her husband made an appearance on the stage. “Barbara has remarked to friends that Nancy is strikingly ungrateful for all the loyalty and deference the Bushes have shown the Reagans for eight years,” the magazine reported. That same week, Knight Ridder newspapers published a story in which White House reporter Owen Ullmann wrote that while it was “final curtain time” for her husband’s presidency, Nancy “apparently does not want to get off the stage.”
The reports were denied, unconvincingly, on all sides. Nancy’s press secretary, Elaine Crispen, insisted the first lady was “totally supportive” of the Bush candidacy and that there was “no feud between them.” Vice President Bush himself, sensitive to the fact that the stories had obviously come from his own camp, sent Nancy a note in which he called them “outrageous.” Crispen quoted Bush as having written: “I’ll be damned if I let anything nasty come between us. You and the president deserve much better than two damn stories.” Bush’s campaign dispatched Stu Spencer to convince Nancy that the best way to preserve her husband’s legacy was to help elect his vice president.
* * *
On Election Day, Bush pulled off a solid victory over Democrat Michael S. Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts. For the Reagans, there would be one last presidential Thanksgiving at the ranch and one last pre-Christmas weekend at Camp David, where they were serenaded by the enlisted men who worked ther
e. Everywhere Nancy turned, there were emotional good-byes. Her aides had to keep her steadily supplied with tissues. The Reagans spent Christmas in their new Bel Air home, where some of their furniture had already been moved, before heading to the Annenbergs’ estate near Palm Springs for their traditional New Year’s Eve celebration.
As Bush’s inauguration approached, the incoming first lady got in a few parting shots at the outgoing one. At one preinaugural event, Barbara pointed to her own new clothes and suggested to reporters that they should not get used to seeing her so dolled up: “Please notice—hairdo, makeup, designer dress. Look at me good this week, because it’s the only week.” No one could miss the dig at Nancy. But, in fact, Barbara’s tastes did not run toward J. C. Penney; she was a regular customer of couturiers Bill Blass and Arnold Scaasi.
January 20, 1989, finally arrived, dawning gray and mild. The Reagans ate breakfast early, then went downstairs to say one last farewell to the household staff in the State Dining Room. The commander in chief received a final briefing from National Security Adviser Colin L. Powell, who made it a short one: “The world is quiet today.”
Ronnie left a note in the desk of the Oval Office for Bush. Then it was time to greet the next president and vice president and their families and head to the Capitol. Ronnie and George Bush got into one car; Nancy and Barbara Bush, into another, for the ride up Pennsylvania Avenue.
From the platform on the West Front of the Capitol, Nancy looked across the sweep of the National Mall, with its monuments to great presidents and their ideas. She remembered how it felt to be in that same spot eight years before. How little she had known back then of the triumphs that lay ahead and the price that would be demanded to achieve them. “The whole day was like a dream,” she wrote later, “and suddenly this part, too, was over.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 56
